JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

Just on the heels of yesterday’s post of RIYBBV vs. ROYGBIV comes this lovely discovery in the highly unusual and original work by Emily Vanderpoel, Color Problems of the Layman, printed in 1903, a gorgeous but mysterious book in which she sought not so much to analyze the components of color itself, but rather to quantify the overall interpretative effect of color on the imagination.  I know this sounds begging and vague, but I really haven’t been able to make much headway in her theory.  Ms. Vanderpoel looked deeply and arithmetically into art—she also produced a numerical grid of the artwork that she analyzed, going a step further to re-order the reality of the painting into a representative 10×10 square, distributing the color sense according to a secret algebra that I cannot identify.

The series is preceded by a further presentation of the colors side-by-side (and reversed) as well as another plates of the colors side-by-side presnting their gradient tints:

And lastly, those lovely plates, larger: